Aryn Baker

Aryn Baker is the Middle East Bureau Chief for TIME, a role in which she covers politics, society, the military and the regional war on terror. She also covers both Pakistan and Afghanistan, for which she was Bureau Chief from 2008 to 2010. Before moving permanently to the region, Baker was an associate editor of TIME Asia, based in Hong Kong. In August 2010, Baker’s story about Bibi Aisha, a young Afghan woman whose nose had been cut off on Taliban orders, ignited a national and international discussion about women’s rights, the Taliban and whether or not the U.S. should stay in the country.

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When former Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud suggested last week at a terrorism conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the U.S. should have used the death of Osama bin Laden in May as an excuse to immediately pull troops out of Afghanistan, he was met with …

Ten years ago today, the assassination of a militia leader holed up in the north-east corner of Afghanistan garnered little international attention, except perhaps for the Hollywood-worthy way in which he was killed: two suicide terrorists, posing as Belgian documentary journalists, detonated their explosives-packed video camera just …

When suicide bombers attack, the knee jerk response from officials in NATO and the U.S. Military is that the tactic is a sign of desperation and weakness, and that insurgents would only use it because they have exhausted all other alternatives. Well, it looks like the Taliban are getting pretty good at desperation. Friday morning’s …

The revelation that the only man ever arrested in connection to the brutal maiming of Afghan teen Bibi Aisha has been set freea mere six months after being taken into custody should not come as a surprise. Dismay and frustration, to be sure. But given the current state of justice in Afghanistan, not to mention official disregard …

It is no small irony that his morning’s assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s half brother, politician, and perennial thorn in the side to the U.S. counter-insurgency effort, could not have come at a worse time. For years U.S. and NATO officials have made their displeasure over his outsize political …

Saudi Arabia’s largest university for women is, for the moment, a universe of men. Laborers from Pakistan, India, and Syria crawl over the near-finished classrooms and lecture halls, polishing marble and fine tuning light fixtures. In the state-of-the-art library, technicians from Lebanon are putting the final touches on a vast …

Who killed Rafik Hariri? Today Lebanon got one step closer to answering a question that has plagued this war-wracked nation ever since the 2005 Valentine’s Day truck bombing that killed the country’s prime minister in downtown Beirut. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the UN-backed body investigating the assassination, delivered …

Many musicians have declared that Rock & Roll will save the world. Few, it seems, have as much resting on that gamble as Pakistani rocker Salman Ahmad, founder of South Asia’s hottest rock band, Junoon. Ahmad, who goes by the nickname Sufi Sal, has struggled for year to showcase his peculiar brand of Sufi-inflected rock outside of …

If President Obama’s plan for withdrawal demonstrated the unusual feat of simultaneously pissing off both sides of the aisle in the US, he need not despair: in Afghanistan he most certainly drew applause from both the Taliban, and Karzai – who crowed in an interview with CNN on Sunday that even if things got really bad, he would …

Anywhere else in the world, a hip-hop song about going to the mall would be laughed off the airways. In Saudi Arabia, it gets banned. Mamno3 al Shabab (“guys not allowed,” in the transliterated lingo of international texting, which uses numbers like 3 for sounds that don’t exist in English), one of the latest hits the latest single …

Maha al Qatani settles herself in the driver’s seat, adjusts her headscarf, and with a quick prayer turns the key in the ignition. “I’m not nervous,” she says, even if the uneven tenor of her voice betrays tension. “When we lived in the U.S. I always drove my kids to school.” But this is Saudi Arabia, the only country in …

Majid wants to show me a negligee. Its on sale, and comes with a racy black and red striped thong. When I demur, he eagerly shows me a frilly lace concoction in yellow and tells me that it matches a bra that is also on sale. Quickly he jets a look at my figure, enveloped in a voluminous black abaya and ventures a guess. “D cup?” He …

To get an idea of just how badly things are going in Afghanistan, take a look at the latest “good” news coming out of the prominent southern city (and Taliban strong hold, and heroin trafficking center) of Kandahar: the appointment of a new police chief, Brig. Gen. Abdul Razik, to replace the earlier one who was killed in a suicide …